A Gaudi Day Saturday, Nov 28 2009

26 October, Monday.

Yes, I fail at life. So, it’s only just over a month since I’ve written. Last I left you we were still in Spain, and now three more countries and a few more cities separate us. No big deal. Eep. Well, with all my lonely hours in the apartment until my roommates return, I have plenty of time to update you all on a month of craziness. Bear with me. It’s going to be a whirlwind.

So, with our last day in Barcelona ahead of us, we had a full schedule. We woke up a little late and hit the Sagrada Familia, this time from the inside. Most of it is still under construction, but walking through the marked paths, you can see the huge columns, half-finished stained glass windows, and the beginnings of a gorgeous altar piece. The natural world overtakes the whole space, with tree-trunk columns, lizard motifs, leaf-like moldings, and honeycomb windows. The tour leads you to the outside for a close-up view of the convoluted, exquisitely detailed Nativity façade, and then down to the museum for a historical overview of the cathedral and its construction and design. After the cathedral, we procured a few last souvenirs and then hit the Mercado for lunch. I had a bocatta (sandwich) with delicious crispy bread and sliced meat, and a chocolate croissant, plus the best Kiwi/Mango and Kiwi/Mango/Coconut juice I’ve ever tasted. Then, more souvenirs and a trip to the Picasso museum, which was sadly halted by its being closed.

However, our sadness was softened by a trip to Guell park. It was a long hike on the metro and up an ungodly amount of stairs, but the view from the cliff of a misty Barcelona was beautiful and the forested paths lead down to a mosaic-tiled pavilion that overlooked some of Gaudi’s most famous structures. The mosaics, all colors from bright blues and greens to pearlescent white and pink, cover the whole pavilion and its rounded benches in undulating spirals that twirl down the columns into the colonnade below. We visited his well-known mosaic lizard, took a spin through the simple and bizarre rooms of his house, and listened to the street performers playing under the forest-like colonnade. Back in the city center, we took a stroll past two final Gaudi houses, plus another view of the bizarre blue Battlo, and then stopped for a strange dinner next to our hotel, greasy croquettes and empanadinas and Spanish beer. Then it was an early night before heading on the road again.

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The 100-Year Church Monday, Nov 2 2009

25 October, Sunday.

We woke up in the furnace, had a quick and nearly tasteless hostel breakfast (the cereal was cardboard and the coffee was like wormwood, but the bread and nutella saved it), and took a quick turn past the huge crystal Agbar Tower on our way to the Sagrada Familia, a church designed by Gaudi, the famous Barcelona architect, which has been in the works since the very late 1800s. Though unfinished, its beauty and innovation are still clear. The towers are high and honeycombed, and the lower ones are crowned with painted cups of fruit. The two facades show the Nativity and Passion of Christ. The Nativity side is frothy with stone like peaked whipped cream, covered over with a chaos of angels, shepherds, flowers, and animals, all centered around the Holy Family perched in the center, with the Magi and Shepherds on the two ledges to either side and the Angels in glory above. The Passion side is simpler, with blocky, abstract figures that contrast with the detailed statues on the other face, who show the Stations of the Cross little islands around the front, surrounded by craggy geometric designs and a cryptogram. The columns here, as inside, are wide and fluted and designed to look like abstract trees. On the other faces, around the tops of the columns, are lizards, snakes, snails, and other sorts of animals, none of which one would expect on a church. We sat inside the little chapel, since most of the inside is still being constructed, and heard the rest of Mass so we could look around at the gorgeous stained glass windows, filled with chips of rainbow color, and the high vaulted ceiling supported by more tree-columns. The whole edifice has a neo-Gothic feel, if one were to mix it with a rainforest. Gorgeous, bizarre, and difficult to explain.

We made our way to the Battlo’ house, a beautiful and bizarre blue thing with pastel bubbles and a shimmery pearlescent roof, designed by Gaudi, and the house next to its with its flowery façade. After, we stopped at various souvenir shops, where you absolutely can’t look at anything too long or God forbid touch it without a shopkeeper descending on you. We also realized that they speak Catalan in Barcelona, a mixture of Spanish and French that is not quite the same as either, and which made communication even more interesting. We had amazing good and ridiculously expensive paella for lunch, then stopped at a cool Navajo shop and headed into the Gothic quarter, where the buildings are small and designed straight out of a medieval village. The highlight of this is the Cathedral, Gaudi’s first and more conservative design, which has the perfect form of a Gothic church with a few flowery Gaudi touches. Inside, the pretty gilded alcoves and simple central altar lead out into a gorgeous courtyard, with a central pond and a ring of chapels to Saints around it. In the evening, we had food and drinks at the Dow Jones bar, a stock market themed establishment where the drink prices change based on who’s buying what. Every half an hour or so, the market crashes and all the drinks are dirt cheap for a minute or two, then go back to minimum price until people start buying and they start fluctuating again. We enjoyed the Barcelona game on the televisions (they won, brilliantly) and then called it a night.

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Hola, Barcelona Monday, Nov 2 2009

24 October, Saturday.

A little depressed at Matt’s going, I was somewhat comforted by the upcoming trip to Barcelona. I packed my things and then Marcelo and I left for the airport on the Metro and Ciampino bus, and got there much too early. We ended up waiting in the wrong line for our boarding stamps, and then having to wait in the right line later. The flight was short, too short to sleep much, and then we were at last in Spain! The differences between Barcelona and Rome were early apparent. Barcelona has a much more modern feel, a little seedier, a little newer, a little more varied in its people, who wore all range of clothes, not just purples and designer threads. On the Metro, we even ran into a group of very punky punks with Mohawks and chunky boots and plaids. It was late by the time we reached the city center, so we pretty much just signed in to our oven of a hostel (seriously, I thought I’d die of heatstroke), and fell asleep.

Quote of the Day:
RyanAir flight announcer: Ninety percent of our flights land . . . on time.

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